Let’s Blather/Bewilder All Over… Daikatana

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Daikatana is now available on Steam! Also, I hate myself. Therefore, what better occasion is there for me to try out the infamous first-person flop for the very first time? That’s right: in the following video, you get to experience my first moments of Daikatana with me. John Romero and co’s ambitious yet ultimately gravely flawed pet project has quite a dubious reputation, but it has its fair share of defenders as well. Maybe I’ll… enjoy it? Appreciate it on some abstract level? Get so angry and frustrated that my eyeballs pop out of my head from the sheer rage pressure building inside my noggin? Who knows. Let’s find out together! Because why not?

Having now played the game, let me just say: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

100 Comments

I never played it either.. I remember it being all the rage in the game press back in 98, but then it kind of went off the radar and when it finally came out, I never got round to trying it because of all the bad reviews. Which is weird, because at the time I was a poor student and I downloaded like, every game there was off the time’s equivalent of torrents…

You mean you have not “sucked it down”? How’s that for an advertising jingle: “Suck it Down!” Yea, that was/is/ever-shall-be Romero. King of the shysters, frauds, and erstwhile dummies…;)

The one crowning achievement of this game was the introduction of….*gasp* the legions of killer frogs inexplicably falling from the sky, each brimming with murderous intent! Each setting its sights on….you! Rivet! Rivet-rivet! Brrrrr—–rr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r…….! Scare RYYYYYY! Rivet! Ri—…..ad inifinitum.

(What a laughingstock that game was, and Romero himself proved the most amusing facet of the whole enchilada.) Put this thing back in the ground, please. Digging it up is sacrilege! It never lived in the first place!

With the exception of a few bits of okay level design and the ambition of trying to be four games in one, there’s not too much that’s interesting about Daikatana; it’s just a bad game with bad enemy and weapon design, irritating level design, and horrendous forced AI companions/escorts who manage to ruin even the few bits of good there is.

Edit: one thing I will give the game is that the later episodes are better than the first, but only slightly (and the last episode comes dangerously close to slipping back in the last few levels)

Noooo. The best weapon ever award obviously goes to the Ovum Spell in Heretic2. It’s hilarious in DM to turn your enemies into helpless poultry until you find yourself running from a giant chicken because on of them had a Tome Of Power ready. :D

I got to the very first level after the time travel. Then my AI partner got stuck somewhere on the level and you can’t progress to the next level without him/her. ALso, your partner dies all the time to the stupidest of things – like being crushed by closing doors. It’s a horrible horrible stupid ugly game.
And that 10 minute unskippable intro… ugh.

Do more! Next time lower the overall volume of the game so we can hear you, and raise the music volume in the game. Believe it or not the soundtrack isn’t too bad, but you could only just make it out during the loading screens in your videos.

Lots of my friends expressing shock and horror that this is even available on Steam. I dunno why; even if it’s as terrible as everyone says it is, for the minimal price it’s probably going to sell a bit to the car-crash observer crowd. It’s certainly worth it as a curio.

I remember playing the demo of this back when it was released. The demo being the horribly long intro cutscene and the terrible ‘get killed by annoying frogs and bugs that you can’t see clearly while using a crappy weapon’ level shown in the videos. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t buy it.

I heard it got better later, but I have no idea what they were thinking using that as the opening level and/or the demo.

PS/ Some of the Japanese names are rather ridiculous.. it’s like they picked them at random from a list of japanese words and anime names.

To be fair, incredibly lacist accents aside, the pronunciation of those ridiculous Japanese names is surprisingly mostly fine. There’s a few sticking points (it’s Ka-Gay not Ka-Gee) but mostly better than you’re expect.

Sorry, I don´t want to defend this trainwreck of a game (bought it on day of release, damn the hype), but Nathan does´nt even try to win anything here… he´s rushing through the march level, leaving all pickups on the floor and starts complaining that he has no ammo? He does not use the “health-fruits”, he skips the tutorial bit about shooting control boxes to shut down stationary guns…

I quit watching after he thought that the mega-shield would protect him from the barrier… it´s an old game, Nathan, one of those that really kept you thinking about a way out, not one of those modern day games that show you the solution to the level in a cutscene before the gaming even starts.

Daikatana might be a rotten piece of software, but your style of play would lead to defeat in most of the old school shooters…

It’s pretty fun to watch and see how awful this game is, but I can’t help but think it would be more damning of the material if you bothered to try playing it for real, instead of skipping the helpful items over and over and over. (If you’re genuinely not seeing them, it may be time to get on RPS’s vision plan….)

Personally, after watching this, I have to think this game was unfairly maligned. Seems like any other shooter from that era. The game play appears nigh identical in execution to games which were considered good at the time, and it makes me think it’s poor reputation is more opinion than fact. Games are subjective, of course, but nothing here stands out as obviously bad to me, except maybe that annoying ticking during the loading screens. Also, as you said, Nathan just isn’t playing this the way it needs to be played, which is hardly the games fault.

You guys (RPS) need to pay more attention to GOG. They’ve had Daikatana for months.

In fact, the GOG guys do a lot of legwork to make sure these old games run well enough on new systems, and collect a bunch of “extras” (manuals, hint books, soundtracks, etc.) that they include for free with every purchase. The IP owners then lazily take the fruit of GOG’s efforts and fling it up on Steam for some extra cash that GOG doesn’t get a cut of. I’ve seen a lot of this lately.

For me, it was doing some vendor work for Ion Storm not long after they spun up, then losing track of them as I switched industries. Three years later I interviewed a candidate for a development position. I asked him what project he was currently involved with, and he told me.

Dunno if Nathan reads the comments, but you really need to knock the in game sound down a few notches when recording yourself. While I know we are watching for the game, the you are only just audible under the game’s din is kinda odd. Think you had that issue on the Shadow Warrior video too.

EDIT: After watching this for a while it looks like the first Unreal. Just a very, very, very, very (repeat for the next four hours) shit version of Unreal. One that was whacked together on a lunch break with no thought toward level design, lighting or balance.
It really is as crap as the old reviews said!

Best set up would be for Nathan to record his own voice separately, and properly mix them together afterwards.

But if he doesn’t want to do that, then yes at the very least just turn down the game audio.

I couldn’t understand anything Nathan said during the overlong intro. At first I thought it was just an audio glitch or some phantom noise, until I realized it was Nathan whispering at way too low a volume compared to the game audio.

It gets slightly better during the actual gameplay, simply because his voice isn’t being completely drowned out by game dialog, but you still have to jack up your PC’s volume to get his voice to a comfortably understandable level. And by that point, the game’s audio is at an uncomfortably loud level.

I didn’t buy the game to play the rest of it in ’98, but I bothered to download the multiplayer demo on my lowly dial-up connection. It was actually a lot of fun, but apparently not enough to sell me on it.

Honestly, Anachronox was the game everyone should remember from Ion Storm.

What I’ve come to learn from watching these videos is that as bad as Daikatana is, and it is bad (but I’ve been well aware of that for years), Nathan doesn’t appear to be very competent with shooters mechanics from the 90’s either.

Dear god! I’d heard about it’s terrible gameplay, but that loading screen sound effect alone is horrendous. Whose idea was it to put in a constant tapping during the loading screen? Loading screens are annoying enough without adding in sounds that give you a damn headache…